Abstract
Memory forms an afterlife of Partition. The stories of uprooting and violence are never the same. They are narrated in different forms. The language of narration is laden with contradiction and ambivalence. It is at times incoherent and at times silent. There is not a single Partition narrative but many, not always complete or resolved. The official archive and the nationalist commemoration, however, make the British partitioning of India into a political certitude. As a commanding event that forever changed India’s boundaries and constructed a definite political identity, Partition becomes in the mainstream political narrative a moment of closure. Reams have been written about the ‘why’ of this vivisection. Dominant historiography engages with the high politics of Partition and probes the tripartite manipulations of the colonial state, the Congress and the Muslim League in the 1940s. In major historical accounts, however, the truth(s) of popular memory is somewhat silenced.
It is through memory alone that we understand the emotional history of Partition. Significantly, Partition’s memory remains as elusive as ever. It stays unresolved and incomplete. Memory often eludes historical narration, as it is indeed difficult to fathom the depths and layers of subjective experience. The complexity of memory and its palpable dimensions complicate the project of writing a history of Partition and violence, precisely because we do not always have the language to narrate the multiplicity of memory and its variegated structure. Language has its own limits. Experience is never captured fully in words. Gestures, tone and silences also make the story and there are memories that resist representation.
Jayanti Basu’s interpretive book crafted mainly through her interviews with the victims, perpetrators and witnesses from upper caste Bengali Hindus, who experienced the events of 1946–48, helps us come close to the complexity of the Partition story and the impossibility of its narration. Inspired by Ashis Nandy’s pioneering methodology and path-breaking interventions on history and memory, Basu offers a psychological and subjective history of how the trauma of violence and uprooting has shaped the individual and collective selves of Bengali Hindus. The multivocality of the memory of Partition’s afterlife is represented in her work.
As a psychoanalyst, Basu offers the ‘psychological truth’ and a psychoanalytical understanding of Partition by exploring the memory of those who were dislocated from east Bengal. She is sensitive to the play of the unconscious. Listening is a crucial part of her strategy. Central to her analysis is her engagement with the nature of memory and narrative form. She relates more to the truth of memory and reflects less on actual political and mainstream events that happened. She takes into account the particular self of people leaving east Bengal; she talks about how this affects their memory of Partition, their trauma and the different ways in which they dealt with it.
Basu assesses the rich complexity of the human experience in response to the anguish of Partition. Emotions of fear, anger and guilt repeatedly appear in the selected narratives. Basu’s work shows that Partition is not a story of victims alone. It is also a story of perpetrators. Many of her respondents identified with both victims and perpetrators. The binary of victim and victimiser is blurred in their narratives shaped by the unconscious. The shifts in individual memory reflect the myriad experiences within a life history in which Partition and violence appear as metaphor rather than event. The memory of violence did not form a crucial part of their reminiscences. Many of her subjects spent hours talking glowingly about the pre-Partition days and the glorification of their homeland, a kind of an idealised past. Their stories were partial. But the question is: is the blurred memory of Partition a denial of violence, as Basu suggests, or is it a forgetting of trauma? Does it reflect a reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting in shaping the historical experience and narrative, as Paul Ricoeur would argue? Even if the Partition violence is not germane to individual memory, it undeniably and profoundly underpins the collective consciousness of the Bengali bhadralok. I am reminded of Jeffrey Alexander’s work which is concerned with traumas that become collective. Drawing on an interplay of history, psychology and sociology, Alexander points out that although individual experiences of pain shape the cultural construction of collective trauma, it is, however, a threat to the collective rather than individual identity that defines the suffering.
Basu’s work suggests that a psychological understanding of Partition does not always affirm stereotypes and prejudices. The multiplicity of selves is reflected in the ways Muslims are perceived in the upper caste Bengali narratives. For instance, in her reading of two active supporters of ‘Hindutva’, she brings out the ambivalent feelings towards Muslims. Her informant Shashanko oscillated between condemnation of Muslims and sympathy for their plight. He also confessed that he had been saved by Muslims in Noakhali. The inconsistency and contradiction in such complex accounts show that there is no one truth of Partition violence and that stereotypes are reworked differently in an individual self. Basu also reveals the ambiguities in the migrants’ decisions to flee from east Bengal.
Unlike other works on the Bengal Partition, Basu’s focus is on the memory of Partition through life stories. She seeks not to give a closure to the Partition story. But instead, she tries to situate Partition in an individual life history. In this sense, hers is not an oral history of Partition, as she herself states. Her principal concern is to focus on understanding the non-linear intricacies of memory in life histories in which Partition is ambiguously entangled. Basu’s oblique yet significant and sensitive engagement with the texture of memory makes her project stand out among other works on the Partition of Bengal.
Basu makes a distinction between what she terms the ‘soft violence’ of Partition in Bengal, where there were relatively few attacks and killings, with the ‘hard violence’ of the Punjab, where there were multiple deaths and the extent of violence was more horrific and immediate. She focuses on the nature of ‘soft violence’ with its repercussions. Yet, the question remains whether Bengal’s violence was indeed soft. It could be that Basu’s respondents, as she herself explains, came from a particular section of upper caste Bengali society and were not brutally hit by violence and carnage. The complexity of violence is a crucial aspect that requires further engagement. Nemai Ghosh’s film Chinnamul captures the horrific violence of Partition refugees in Bengal and powerfully represents the experience of the marginalised and dispossessed. Joya Chatterji’s work shows the contrast drawn by the officials between the Bengali and the Punjabi refugees. Does this official distinction feed into the dominant Bengali perception at the expense of the popular and subaltern?
Ashis Nandy says that the violence of Partition has remained invisible. Jayanti Basu seeks to break the silence of Partition memory. The inexplicability and uncertainty of the Partition experience is evoked in Basu’s telling phrase emanating from her family memory, Kisui bojhos na (You understand nothing). It meaningfully reveals the difficulty of writing a history of traumatic memory and disassociated feelings.